30 apr 2012

Freedom Tower Update: As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, construction of the Freedom Tower continues to move forward. Parts of the National September 11 Memorial, which will be located elsewhere on a 16-acre site, should be finished by 2013.

Both structures have been the subject of some debate, but public perception of them is improving, and developers remain confident that their work will act as a fitting tribute to the victims of 9/11.

The Freedom Tower is due to be completed in 2013.

The New York City Freedom Tower, which will stand 1,776 feet tall on the site of the former World Trade Center, is the work of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. It will serve as a beacon of freedom, and demonstrate the resolve of the United States, and the people of New York City.

Construction on the tower, which will have a cubic base, began in early 2006. Steel became visible aboveground in 2007, and by 2013 the building will be ready for occupancy - twelve years after the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorist attacks.

The site will also feature the Reflecting Absence memorial, which will honor the 2,986 men and women who died as a result of the terrorist attacks which thrust America, and the world, into war. Over 2,500 people died after the World Trade Center came crashing down to earth, and leaders vow they will never be forgotten.

Smoke clogged the air for many weeks after September 11th, and the rubble burned for months. New Yorkers, and America, will never be the same.

29 apr 2012

if you are a designer please read this

If you are an industrial designer, a graphic designer, a landscape
architect, a media artist, an interior designer, a planner, an
architect, stage or screen designer or creative from any of the design
disciplines, or someone who supports design in Australia - and I know if
you are here that you do!) then this affects you.Every now and then
someone gets up and does something on your behalf. The [Australian
Design Alliance] is standing up for you right now.

STOP PRESS!
The minimum $15,000 has been reached (thanks to you - the supporters of
design in Australia), however, it would be great for them to see how
many people are behind this initiative, please make your voice heard,
you can still pledge until May 2nd. The funds will be put to good use by
the [ADA] team to really back this policy. DID YOU PUT UP YOUR HAND -
THANK YOU :)

The ADA needs your support in convincing our political leaders in Canberra to create and fund a national design policy.

You can pledge your support for as little as $1.

It does not matter how much you contribute, the number of people standing behind it is also of the utmost importance.The project is currently 78% funded. Help them make it there, or exceed their goal! - it is for you.

It
is not very often that I ask anything of our amazing top3 by design
community, but I do ask for just a moment of your time, and as little as
$1 to help the [ADA] reach their goal of raising $15,000 to bring this
policy to the table of the political leaders in Canberra.

The
ADA's mission is to achieve greater recognition and valuing of
Australian design by governments, business and community, plus greater
innovation and collaboration within the design sector together with the
application of strategic design approaches across all sectors

The
AdA's vision is to develop a culture of design in Australia to
strengthen economic competitiveness, innovation, creativity and
sustainability. Its mission is to achieve greater recognition and
valuing of Australian design by governments, business and community,
plus greater innovation and collaboration within the design sector
together with the application of strategic design approaches across all
sectors.

The launch event of the [ADA] in 2010 at Sydney's Opera
House mandated three resolutions for the AdA to pursue a national design
agenda based on:1. National design policy linked to Australia's innovation agenda;2. Design education integrated at all educational levels;3. Case studies demonstrating how good design can contribute to economicgrowth through supporting superior business models and improved publicsector service delivery.

London based designer AndyMartin will present an ambitious new project in partnership with PPP, a Venetian based plastics product company, in the Brera Design District during the FuoriSalone 2012. Gridspace is the exploration of the rigour of geometry and the transparency of plastic.

It is the development of Andy’s fascination with materiality and
elemental constructions.With the inherent restrictions of a grid form
Andy looks to find the emotion through the raw liquid material of ABS
and acrylic plastic in the transparency and colour. Gridspace tables
can be altered by the user by inserting colour square plugs into the
grid and designing to one’s own imagination creating a playful transient
object of personality. AndyMartin’s collaboration with PPP takes their work into new areas of experimentation. This limited edition
work allows themto collaborate and re think their existing product
and production skills, new materials and processes that would be too
prohibitive to use when designing formass production.

24 apr 2012

Architecture might be the second oldest profession, but it is
remarkable how few women have succeeded in it. Outstanding among them is
Zaha Hadid, a gruff, laughing, scowling, very loud and exotic earth
mother in a hard hat. Indeed, a force of nature in tabard and site
boots. And a function of nature, too. Her latest building designs look
like something that have been wrenched from the firmament: ravishingly
biomorphic, primitive, but futuristic. If modern architecture ever truly
had functional principles, Hadid has abandoned them in favour of a
wilful expressionism that is as wonderful as it is annoying.

Before
Hadid there was Julia Morgan, architect of Randolph Hearst's
Californian castle at San Simeon (1922-1939). Alvar Aalto's wife, Aino,
was an architect, but happy to live and work in her husband's long
Nordic shadow. Lilly Reich was Mies van der Rohe's professional and
personal companion from 1925 to 1938, when he left for the United
States. Some say she was responsible for the design of his Barcelona
Chair. Denise Scott Brown was Robert Venturi's wife and collaborator,
co-author of the book Learning From Las Vegas

In our day, Eva
Jiricna has achieved real distinction and Amanda Levete is a dynamic
partner in the firm Future Systems which gave us the gloriously odd
press box at Lord's and a Selfridges in Birmingham that cheerfully
reversed all rational assumptions about department stores.

But
there is more about Hadid. She became determined not to be either first,
best or different, but to be all of them. As one measure of success,
the Design Museum in London is about to host a major exhibition of her
work.

Hadid was born in a prosperous suburb of Baghdad in 1950,
which in those days had its own garden cities (in magnificent direct
descent from Babylon rather than Letchworth or Welwyn). Some of the
great architects of mid century Modernism - Gio Ponti, Frank Lloyd
Wright, Josep Sert - were at work in the Iraqi capital.

Hadid had a
cosmopolitan education: the family wintered in Beirut, the 'Paris of
the Middle East', mixed with Christians and Jews and she read about
heroic American architecture of the Fifties and Sixties in the pages of
Time and Life magazines. At 54, Hadid won the Pritzker Architecture
Prize, the prestigious annual award which recognises 'significant
contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of
architecture'. She was the first woman to do so.

It was London's
unique architectural culture of the Seventies that formed Hadid. In
1972, she arrived at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, a
private school with a vivid tradition of debate and contrariness. The
AA, as it is always known, was not a milieu for gentlemen in corduroy
suits, suede shoes and knitted ties sitting politely at parallel-action
drawing boards.

Instead, one of the chief influences was the
magnificent, cigar-chomping, aphoristic Cedric Price, designer of an
influential, but never built project, Fun Palace. Indeed, some of the
AA's most famous output - the technophiliac fantasies of Sixties group
Archigram - was also never compromised by the crude processes of
construction. Instead, the notions sit there still in the architectural
imagination - bright, optimistic and wholly uncontaminated by any very
close contact with dismal reality and its water intrusions, its rust and
its pigeon droppings.

For a long time, Hadid seemed to be the
inheritor of this bizarre tradition of becoming famous for what she had
not built. After graduating in 1977, she went to work for Dutchman Rem
Koolhaas, also an AA student and a keen disciple of Cedric Price. She
taught in US universities and, until 1987, she maintained her own 'unit'
at the AA.

She collected plaudits, not contracts. In 1987, she
moved to a studio in Clerkenwell, where she remains, to start an
independent career which began with agonising tribulations and
soul-destroying frustrations, only to develop, wonderfully, into the
self-fulfilling cycle of competitions, prizes, publicity, first-class
air travel and art circuit celebrity.

The first big failure that
led to Hadid's later great success was in the unlikely location of
Cardiff Bay. Architects in private practice exist in a world of
competitions. Since they are never (or rarely) realistically paid for
competing, the system is a sort of tax on the profession. But it is a
tax willingly paid since to win a major public competition guarantees
about five years' work and, with profile raised, offers the realistic
prospect of more to come. So it was in 1994 that Hadid fatefully entered
the competition for a new opera house in Cardiff Bay.

Her winning
design was a dramatic, angular composition, quite unlike anything seen
before. It was immediately criticised on two fronts: first as an elitist
project irrelevant to rundown Cardiff, second as a design that would
present certain practical difficulties to realise.

Funding drifted
away. Cardiff Bay became, in some quarters, a synonym for provincial
philistinism. Meanwhile, Zaha Hadid, a rejected heroine, a champion of
the future, had experienced her second great career move. (The opera
house was never built, replaced by the Wales Millennium Centre, designed
by local architect Jonathan Adams.)

Her first great career move
had been to win a commission in 1991 from furniture manufacturer and
design entrepreneur Rolf Fehlbaum. This was for a fire station at his
Vitra factory in Weil am Rhein. At the time, Fehlbaum was collecting
autograph buildings from celebrity architects, including Frank Gehry who
designed the Vitra Design Museum. Hadid's creative process is to use
paintings to visualise a plastic concept. Not much time is spent on
contemplating the drain schedules.

So the Vitra Fire Station
became a dramatic composition of jutting, irregular, sharp concrete
planes. It is fidgety or dynamic, depending on your view. It is also,
her critics would say, an example of Hadid's dramatic sculptural
strength and lamentable functional weakness. Fehlbaum realised it was
more valuable as a monument than a fire station and the Feuerwehr,
perhaps with relief, moved into more sensible premises.

But the
Vitra connection confirmed Hadid as a leading member of the
international architectural circus. Her first realised building in
Britain was a 1995 temporary pavilion for the magazine Blueprint. In
1999, she won a competition for the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, a
fantastical, earthbound spaceship in the home town of Volkswagen.

In
the same year, she designed a stage for the Pet Shop Boys: Neil Tennant
described her as funny, but terrifying. She built the Rosenthal
Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati in 2003. She has built a 'vanity
factory' for BMW in Leipzig and will build the 2012 Olympic Aquatics
centre in Stratford.

Hadid has evolved a language of form which
has developed from angular and trapezoidal to biologically zoomorphic:
voluptuous to photograph, but - allegedly - difficult to build. Like
Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, who are not so much making art as providing
big-ticket luxury goods for the hyper-rich, Hadid is not so much
designing working buildings as providing what the modern classical
architect Robert Adam calls 'global status products'. While interesting
pheomena, they are, Adam insists, failures as architecture since, being
global and deracinated, they cannot have any relation to context.

Since
Robert Adam, a favourite of the Prince of Wales, is still working in a
style his 18th-century namesake would recognise, with pilasters,
cornices and brackets, his criticism is not unexpected. But nor is it
unfair. Hadid has a genius for formal novelty, but not so much interest
in the technology that makes her daring shapes possible. An example is a
car she has 'designed' for art entrepreneur Kenny Schachter.

It
is as much an unusual morphological experiment as any of her buildings,
but shape-making is no longer a driving force in the automobile
industry. The big interest there is fuel-cell power systems, not
techno-organic blobbismo. Any student can do that. But it will be much
photographed, which is the point.

And yet the world's most famous
woman architect has her practical uses. Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil
Thorsen failed to meet the deadline for delivery of a temporary pavilion
for next month's Serpentine summer party, an international love-in with
cocktails for the Prada-clad art and architecture crowd. So Hadid and
her partner, Patrick Schumacher, have been drafted in at the last minute
to provide an on-time replacement. It will be ready by 11 July.

When
a fantasist gets called in to do first aid on a troubled project, you
know that architecture has changed. No one denies that Zaha Hadid has
been a fundamental force in that process.

Born
Zaha Hadid, 31 October 1950, Baghdad, Iraq. Degree in mathematics, the
American University of Beirut. Studied at the Architectural Association
School in London.

Best of times Now. After years
of being known for her designs not being built, she has had a very good
run. British work includes Maggie's Centre, Victoria Hospital,
Kirkcaldy. She won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. Exhibition
at Design Museum, London

Worst of times The failure to realise her winning design for the Cardiff Bay opera house.

What she says
'As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice
myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't
like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.'

What others say
'She had spectacular vision. All the buildings were exploding... one of
her most beautiful designs - an absolute triumph - was her plan for a
museum of the 19th century. She couldn't care about tiny details. Her
mind was on the broader picture.' Former teacher Elia Zenghelis

13 apr 2012

Have you ever come across a glass house? Not those ones which poses
just huge glass walls or chambers. An apartment made completely of
glass. Well, here is one! This is no movie set or any kind of art
object; it is in fact a residence. I can imagine your amazement. This
glass concept home is created by Italian design firm Santambrogio. Carlo
Santambrogio and designer Ennio Arosio have said that it was the desire
of the client to build it in glass completely. Located in Milan, the
house sits in the middle of a wood clearing. The glass material used for
its construction is 6 to 7 mm thick. The material can be specially
heated during the winter, which is one of the best and most demanded
characteristic feature. It is simply awesome to behold and looks like a
perfectly cut and polished glass cube from outside, with a blue tinge to
it. But I really wonder how one could live inside such a building.
As you can see, everything single thing in this house is made of
glass including the floorings, ceilings as well as the staircases — yes
you’re reading it right, glass staircases. Even the book cases, the
tables and the cabinets are made of glass. The only things we could find
not being made out of glass are the bed and the fancy couch. Actually
the bed frame and the couch frame ARE made of glass, but there’s a nice
mattress in there to accommodate your body — after all, who would want
to sleep on glass?!

9 apr 2012

New House 2011 is a design event that happens in Santa Catarina, Brazil,
in which designers create spaces based on a theme or type of room. Music Room was a concept, designed by interior designers Salvio Moraes Jr. and Moacir Schmitt Jr. of CASAdesign Interiores, for people to enjoy music in a modern space.

Neutral tones of the furniture are mixed with pops of color
throughout. The LED panel even changes color and pattern with the beat.
One of the coolest features of the room is the backlit wall shelving.
Made from Corian®, the geometric spaces are highlighted by the blue
lighting.
Their goal was to create a residential environment with a “touch of
club” to enjoy music, reading, relaxation, and entertainment with family
and friends.

8 apr 2012

The famous Australian photographic artist, Marian Drew, wanted a house
in which she and her family could enjoy their weekends, and felt a
construction derived from the concept of a luxury campsite would fit the
bill. The unique holiday home was designed by Simon Laws of Anthill Constructions, and is located on the Queensland coast amongst mature Bloodwoods and Cabbage Palms, in the town of Seventeen Seventy.

The living and sleeping pods, and the bath house, of the Drew House were
built and fully completed in Brisbane, and transported across 500km to
the chosen site. The prefabricated sweeping roof structure that covers
the outdoor connecting core–consisting of an alfresco dining and living
area–was erected onsite along with the adjoining decks

The rustic materials make a serenely neutral environment that fits with
the natural bushland scenery, whilst the intricate architectural fan
shapes give the unorthodox campsite a certain elegance and flair.

4 apr 2012

For nearly a century, architects have viewed facades with
mistrust, going on fear and loathing. This feature, almost universal in
all previous architecture, ever, came to be seen as fake and deceitful,
as something like the hypocritical morality of the 19th century, and
contrary to the modernist ideal of displaying the inner nature of a
building on the outside. In the 1960s the architects and theorists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown led a reaction, praising what they called the "decorated shed",
but by the 1980s the revived facade was being abused as a postmodern
wrapper for bankers' palaces, which seemed to prove that the fear and
mistrust had been justified.
The new Roath Lock studios for BBC Wales in Cardiff
are, architecturally speaking, almost all facade. There are 250 metres
of it, looking across an old dock to the trophies of Cardiff's 25-year
efforts at renewal – the Welsh Assembly Building by Rogers Stirk Harbour
+ Partners, and the Wales Millennium Centre on the site where Zaha Hadid's
doomed opera house was once planned. Around the studios is empty space
awaiting development under a regeneration plan backed by the Welsh
government, and behind is a bit of Cardiff's docks that is still in use
for shipping.
The studios are built on the success of Doctor Who and its spin-off Torchwood,
just as Cardiff's finest buildings were once founded on coal. The
phenomenal popularity of the Time Lord's show, which since its revival
in 2005 has been made in Wales, has helped provide the funds and
confidence to build a £20m complex where the programme is now made. A
corridor in the new building has been named "Russell's Alley", in
tribute to the contribution of the Doctor Who executive producer and screenwriter Russell T Davies.
The
aim of the new building is to provide ample, well-appointed, highly
sustainable production and post-production facilities for the making of Doctor Who, Casualty, Upstairs Downstairs and the BBC's longest running soap opera, the 37-year-old Welsh-language Pobol y Cwm. It means that scattered facilities can be brought together: the downstairs in Upstairs Downstairs, for example, used to be several miles away from the upstairs. Now they are under the same roof.
The
complex consists of large sheds interspersed with functional courts and
alleys, as in a Hollywood film lot, punctuated with sets of extreme
specificity. For Casualty, the mediocre design of a PFI
hospital is recreated with uncanny precision, down to the ridiculous
public art in the car park. For Pobol y Cwm they have built a
chapel front, an estate agent and chippy, and little back gardens with
immaculately reconstructed B&Q decking.
Unusual design
requirements include corridors wide enough for two Daleks to pass, and a
recreation of Holby City hospital's car park in precisely the same
orientation as the one in its former location in Bristol. The fear is
that meteorologically aware Casualty nerds will bombard the
Beeb with complaints if they spot that the shadows are falling in a
different way. They also had to make sure that an ambulance could roar
into the place without hitting any buildings.
Amid all this stage
architecture, what might be called "proper" architecture – as in,
designed by architects and written about by architectural critics –
doesn't get much of a look in. After all, not even the greatest geniuses
in the history of the art, not Palladio nor Wren nor Le Corbusier, have
performed spatial magic to match the big-inside-small-outside effect of
the Tardis.
Nor is this new building a work of the BBC in Medici mode, as they were in the early days of their expansion of Broadcasting House. It is more like the installation of BBC North at MediaCity in Salford,
where a hopefully business-like deal was struck with the developer of a
publicly assisted regeneration project. In Cardiff their partner was Igloo, an investment fund dedicated to "socially responsible development", who appointed the architects FAT, whose design seems to have taken the BBC somewhat by surprise.Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust,
said it was like a cross between the Doge's Palace and Ikea, which for
Sean Griffiths of FAT is mostly a compliment. His practice is, he says,
"the UK leader in decorated sheds", which was what was called for here.
Or rather, there was no choice but for it to be a shed, only whether to
decorate it or not.
The issue, says Griffiths, was "how do you
give any life at all to an immensely long elevation with only one door",
which looks onto a quayside awaiting development and currently
populated only by some hardy black pines, chosen for their ability to
survive salty air. It has to deal with a problem common to incomplete
regeneration projects, which is how to suggest life that is not yet
there. A laughable hotel across the water, with a frantic roof in the style of Santiago Calatrava, shows how not to do it.
The
BBC, moreover, are extremely sensitive about giving away future
plotlines and details, and don't want people looking into their studios.
The windows to the cafeteria are frosted, in case anyone peers in, sees
a new Doctor Who alien having a cup of tea and goes viral with
phone-snaps of it. Transparency, a favourite trope of modern
architects, is therefore not possible.
FAT, who need little
encouragement to come up with such things, have responded with a facade
that is mannerist, baroque and "sci-fi retro", which has big
cross-shaped windows in reference to Casualty, and gothic octofoils in homage to William Burges,
the exuberant Victorian who built his greatest works near here. It is,
says Griffiths, "a bit mountain-y" and "a bit wave-y", in response to
the local landscape. You can detect the shapes of houses like those in Pobol y Cwm that "morph into space invaders", with a centrepiece that is "Doctor Who goes to Las Vegas" or "baroque mixed with what a cyberman looks like".
The
aim is to communicate and engage, to escape constricting notions of
good taste and create a "narrative" with which people can connect – and
whether you get all the references is not entirely the point, as opposed
to getting the sense that someone is talking to you. "Most people don't
go into most buildings," says Griffiths. "The facade is what they
experience. If you mention the Taj Mahal, what people think of is the
facade." He wants to address "the experience when you are there", rather
than the "doodle seen from 20,000 feet" that some iconic architects
provide. The elevation is designed to work at different scales, with its
exaggerated gables speaking to the view from across the dock, while a
lower level squiggle addresses the eyeline of passersby.
If FAT
can sound flip they are actually serious. They study historic
architecture in a way that few other contemporary architects do, and try
to learn from, for example, the effects of layering and depth you get
in 16th- and 17th-century Italy. They compose and seek complexity. They
want to make their shed seem substantial and "tactile", so they give an
exaggerated thickness to its facade.
That the results are not
precisely like those of Florence or Rome is due to the ferocious
constraints of time and money under which buildings are now built, and
the contracts that limit the architect's role to specific areas. FAT
would have liked to spread their influence deeper into the building – to
the somewhat basic reception and cafeteria areas, for example – but it
was not possible. "Computers and Excel spreadsheets make the world,"
says Griffiths, "and it's a strange assumption to think that architects
have any power to change it." FAT's attitude is rather to make the best
of what they've got.
Making the best of it in this case leads to a
facade where their escape from good taste has been achieved with
exceptional success, but which might fairly be described as stonking. It
is bold, engaging, rich, entertaining and complex. It commands its
tough site and helps you forget that this zone is still largely
wasteland. It achieves something beyond the abilities of many current
architects, which is to make a very big facade. Of all the BBC's recent
adventures in architectural patronage it is, by accident, one of the
most successful.